Matt

Vending machines don’t accept pennies, and both nickels and pennies just end up taking up space in jars. How often are you buying groceries and you wait ad get out the exact change? It slows other people down costs the government more money. Its logical, besides America got rid of its half cent in 1857 for being worth too little. Frankly we should consider getting rid of the dime as well since we use quarters the most anyway. And one last thing wheat pennies will become even rarer, which will increase their value so with the pennies that I have, I’m not complaining.

joe

Phil

The mint actually produced steel pennies in 1943 because copper was needed for the war effort. They were zinc plated to protect the steel from rust, but the zinc peeled off and the coins rusted anyways. At the same time, nickles were made with a 35% silver content. They are now traded for their value in silver.

Also, the government experimented with aluminum cents in the ’70s but the alloy was too hard to use in the minting process.

ScottZ

How is this political? Are you suggesting that it is Obama’s fault that it is no longer economical to keep the penny and nickel in circulation? Stop trying to politicize everything, it is a big part of why the GOP lost this November.

bbb

It IS political because it’s a decision made by a political appointee. To repeat JP’s earlier response:
“Well Scotty, it is political, the more the current administration continues to produce dollars and cents out of thin air…now listen here……the more worthless the money becomes!!!! Do ya get it?” You obviously have now historical knowledge of the late 1970′s. I don’t usually engage in name-calling but you are an IDIOT!!!!!

wyjebane lor

Mike

This will not work… You will need nickels or change the quarter to .30 cents. If and item is .75 cents and I have three quarters. Sorry, but you have to round up to .80 cents I would need a nickel. HELLO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chick

Umm they’re only saying to round up on the amounts that would need pennies or nickels so no you would not need one. Three quarters would do just fine for paying for an item at $0.75. They even explained this and gave an example.

Steven

this is bunk, the mint is out to make profit, they charge the U.S. treasury to make the money. It is a profit scam this isn’t going to go away just because they get rid of pennies and nickles, the next thing you know they are going to complain that they lost profit and have to charge more to make dollar bills it will never end….

David G

So what if they lose money minting those coins. They practically last forever — unlike paper money. $187 million is barely a rounding error in the budget. I’d like to know what they are going to do when the dime and quarter cost too much.

John Wakeman

Yancey, you are truly frightening. It is amazing there are so many people who think like you (or “fail” to think – like you). Are you so willing to give up all your freedom for technological whizz-bang convenience? Think carefully about what you wish for. Really think about the consequences of what you are suggesting!

Robert Pearson

I can understand getting rid of the penny, even though i do not like the idea of getting rid of Our currency. I can also understand rounding up to the nearst nicklé, but i do not think getting rid of the nickle will be a good idea. It will be needed.

Once they take them out of circulation there will be no way to enforce the laws against selling them for scrap. Scrap prices are down at the momment but they peaked a while back wher a pre 1983 penny (solid copper) was worth almost 3 cents and a nickel was worth almost 10 cents. Some of us have been hording for quite some time. There was one story of a guy who bought $1 million worth of nickels.

Warren

Consider inflation, In 1960 the Penney was worth 8 cents in todays money and the nickel was worth 39 cents. We made change just fine back then. Getting rid of the Penney and nickel won’t make any difference at all. Let’s do away with all the coins and round to the nearest dollar. If what you are selling is worth 33 cents sell it 3 for a dollar. Just because something has been around as long as you can remember doesn’t mean it’s always going to be around. Change happens – go with it!

Pez

“Some have asked whether our silver coins will disappear. The answer is very definitely no.

Our present silver coins won’t disappear and they won’t even become rarities. We estimate that there are now 12 billion–I repeat, more than 12 billion silver dimes and quarters and half dollars that are now outstanding. We will make another billion before we halt production. And they will be used side-by-side with our new coins.

Since the life of a silver coin is about 25 years, we expect our traditional silver coins to be with us in large numbers for a long, long time.

If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.” – Lyndon B. Johnson, July 23, 1965.

Public statement solicited from Geithner! Are you, and if so for how long, a member of The Pilgrims Society, Second Floor, 122 East 58th Street, New York. What IS it with this group claiming the President and Secretary of State as “honorary” members, yet refuses to make a membership roster available for public viewing? With the entire USA military and all our foreign relations under the direction of these two officials, some of us want to know who they’re associating with, out of public view!

lyle

I buy something at Dollar Tree for 1 dollar, my state sales tax is 7%, so I now pay 1.10 instead of 1.07 Dollar Tree has to pay the tax to the state. The state says you owe us tax on 1.03 because that is what the buyer paid. Am I looking at this right?

epickett

I was wondering about sales tax transactions as well. So are the states going to change their sales tax to 10%? Are all the stores going to stop pricing stuff at $9.99 and make it $10? I’m sure that the number crunchers for the big box stores are trying to figure out which pricing structure will make the most profit for them as we speak…

Clint

US is late again with the money system.
In Canada the pennies will be out by Dec. 31 2012. But not the Nickel.
Since +/- 10 years we don’t have a one dollar in paper.
In metal we have the one and two dollar.
We get used very fast.
When I was a kid, my father pay me in one dollar bills to make-it bigger.

Nick

Lance

It costs almost 10 cents to make a dime…Almost 25 cents to make a quarter. So?
Who cares how much it costs to make? That is the price of doing business. Minting and printing money costs money…period. Always will.

So, the Feds want to stop minting nickels and pennies to save what? How much is being saved by the Fed buying $40billion in mortgage backed securities every month (QEIII)?
Why aren’t people waking up to the insanity that is entrenched in our government?

Benjamin

OK, this what Geithner et al should do: collect all the pennies and reissue the copper-plated (STEEL) coin as a nickel… then do the same with the nickel coin, collect, melt, and re-issue them as dimes (there’s no rule that says a nickel has to be five cents, a nickel used to be three cents in 1875 or so…), then withdraw the dime coins. Keep the quarters. This has the effect of eliminating the penny, which is a pain anyway to keep around. Round all transactions to the nearest five cents (so three quarters or fifteen “5 cent coppers”) will still pay for a 75-cent transaction, five-cent copper plated coins cover the former “nickel” function).
Then the government can go blow all the treasury savings by issuing WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons like Gerald Ford promoted in the late 70s (which was rich because the Fed causes inflation, what the hell would a WIN button do??), and we can all wear them and pretend we have control over something.

John

What you don’t seem to understand is that this is a wealth grab. The same as F.D.R. in the “30″s with gold and L. B. J. in the “60″s with silver. As with silver the government has all ready been removing the penny from circulation, long before the announcement . ” Desperate Times Calls For Desperate Measures”. To see how desperate the government is for cash go to DANIEL AMERMAN’S “The Economic Deception At The Heart Of The Fiscal Cliff” and you will get a bone chilling jolt in the icy sea of economic reality. Yea! We will get Cyber Digits for money if we don’t starve to death first. That will be the total wealth grab. Money, REAL MONEY, belongs to the people not the government. It will then be better managed to the benefit of all and not to a privileged elite.

NotonmyWatch

Think your money is not subject to the laws of supply and demand on oil.

Your money’s real wealth is being stolen by systematically reducing the supply of coins to zero and replacing it with paper.

Since 1913 the US fiat dollar has lost 97% of its real purchasing power. You can not replace something of value with worthless US paper and not have it show . The US issued pennies’ base medal, is now literally worth more than the mint face value.

Thank about that for a second, it took 236 million paper dollars to produce only 49 million dollars worth of real copper pennies, a loss of $187 million in minting costs.

Even a moron may finely see how truly worthless this paper has become. Your government can’t print oil or gas, therefor to produce real money, it must ever devalue the fiat dollar in order to pay the very fuel intensive and always increasing cost of mining and minting. The US can no longer hide the desperate truth from the little people, it’s now in your face, you have but to look.

The Roman Emperors did the same thing, they cut the edges of coins to inflate the money supply. It’s a way of confiscating real value . Fast forward to 2012 and now coin is devalued with fiat paper.

Thus even paper money will be to costly to ship and it will be replaced with magic digital money. Eventually of course this will lead to a confiscation of what is left of your financial freedom. Hey what’s a few pennies among friends anyway?

When the government tells you that copper pennies are worthless , what they are really saying is that our money is worthless , and oh by the way the copper is just fine but it’s not for you little people.

Federal Reserve banks, including the capital stock and surplus therein and the income derived therefrom, shall be exempt from Federal, State, and local taxation, except taxes upon real estate.
Title 12 section 531 ( H. R. 7837 Public, No. 43 December 23, 1913)
These people haven’t paid cent one in taxes for 90 + years and now you want to rise taxes and make cut on “We the People”………..Oh Please!!!!

Grandmak

It makes one wonder if this isnt the beginning of them eventually illuminating all our physical money to start the chip implant so they can track us and control us and bringing in a one world money…. Just a thought

Kristen

I have been saying for years to get rid of some of the change. So we round up or down. Statistically, it’ll wind up a wash. Some up, some down. It’s just not financially sound to create a product that costs more than its value.

Zack Jones

This may end up being a bit of a ramble, but I’ll try to organize my thoughts. It’s always bothered me how much people under value the penny, from a social/philosophical point of view. A lot of my friends, throw away the the pennies they get in change or drop them in the parking lot when we are leaving, I even have one friend who drops any change (coins) he gets. Ever since I was a child in the seventies, people have argued that we should drop the penny, and that was when a kid could still find penny candy. My problem is this, if people decide that $0.01, is worthless and zero X any number is zero, won’t that ultimately to under value the dollars they have, since anything made of a hundred zeros is simply zero. I know I’ve already been told I think too much.

I also wonder if anyone knows if the government has looked into non-metal lower denomination coins, like ceramic/plastic composite. As a coin collector/accumulator , I would miss those coins.

Lastly, I’m in favor of the dollar coin, but wonder if dropping both dollar bills and half dollars, would be best, increasing quarters and adding the dollar coin to replace the function of the half. Does anyone else, see a point in having the half dollar and why? So you know, I do like kennedy it has nothing to do with him lol.

[...] nickels cost more to produce than they were worth in the market. In fact, the Mint posted a loss of $187.7 million last year – more than triple the losses recorded associated with coin minting in [...]

[...] nickels cost more to produce than they were worth in the market. In fact, the Mint posted a loss of $187.7 Million last year – more than triple the losses recorded associated with coin minting in [...]

[...] nickels cost more to produce than they were worth in the market. In fact, the Mint posted a loss of $187.7 Million last year – more than triple the losses recorded associated with coin minting in [...]

[...] Skew News – Earlier this week Canada announced that they would be phasing out their penny coin. On the heels of the Canadian announcement, U.S. Treasury Secretary, Tim Giethner stated in a press conference today that the U.S. Mint will remove the penny and nickel coins from circulation, starting early in January 2013. [...]

[...] nickels cost more to produce than they were worth in the market. In fact, the Mint posted a loss of $187.7 Million last year – more than triple the losses recorded associated with coin minting in [...]

[...] Not yet, but I’m sure it’s in the works and could happen in the near future .I think the hoax originated here and it went viral.I also noticed that wealth wire pulled down from their website. Share [...]

[...] Dear… At about the 4:20 mark, Mr. Phillips apparently thinks the satire website Skew News story about the U.S. Mint getting rid of the penny and nickel next year was true. It was not, as detailed [...]